Long before Dale Mortensen earned the Nobel Prize in economics on Monday, he spent summer vacations camping and fishing on the flanks of Mount Hood. During his high school years in Hood River, the native-born Oregonian enjoyed acting and singing as much as math and science.

Mortensen, a visiting professor at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and two other economists were honored for their work in explaining why unemployment can remain high despite large numbers of job openings -- a trend that is playing out today.

The other Nobel winners are Peter Diamond, an economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Christopher Pissarides, a professor at the London School of Economics.

Mortensen, 71, was born in Enterprise, the oldest of three boys. They were raised in Hood River, where Mortensen's father was a forester with a local lumber company. The two older boys spent summers logging and fighting fires.

Irving Mortensen, Dale Mortensen's youngest brother, said Dale was the most serious of the three kids and loved books, but wasn't shy.

"Dale had a wonderful singing voice," Irving Mortensen said. "When I was young, I began to love all these old musicals because Dale would sing all over the house, songs from Showboat and My Fair Lady."

After graduating from Wy'East High School in 1957, Mortensen earned a full scholarship to Willamette University in Salem. There, Mortensen was one of the first students to pursue a bachelor's degree in economics with a mathematical approach to it, said Stewart Butler, who was Mortensen's classmate and roommate at the university.

"Dale was very methodical and studious and he was turned on by the subject before he got to graduate school," said Butler, now a Willamette University trustee. "But there was no academic pretense about him. He was outgoing like your normal, everyday student."

Mortensen continued to act and participated in several university productions and was student body president at Willamette during his senior year. After graduating with a bachelor's in economics in 1961, Mortensen earned his doctorate from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, in 1967, joining the faculty at Northwestern University near Chicago in 1965.

Wy'East High School Alumni AssociationDale Mortensen, student at Wy'East High School in Hood River, Oregon in 1956.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it chose Diamond, Mortensen and Pissarides for work that helps economists and others "understand the ways in which unemployment, job vacancies and wages are affected by regulation and economic policy."

The New Deal for Young People, a British government initiative aimed at getting 18- to 24-year-olds back on the job market after long spells of unemployment, "is very much based on our work," said Pissarides, 62. "The ways of dealing with this need not be expensive training -- it could be as simple as providing work experience," he said.

Dating back to the 1970s and 1980s, their work gave economists a new way to look at unemployment trends. They focused on factors such as the skills job seekers have, how they hunt for jobs and the needs of employers. Their work challenged the classical view of markets, where buyers and sellers always find each other. In the real world, sometimes they don't, the Nobel winners found.

Job seekers and job providers, for instance, can encounter obstacles along the way. The skills workers have may not match the skills employers want. Job seekers may not be able to move to a new city for work. Some applicants may jump at the first offer they get, even though it's not the best match.

Their work resulted in the so-called Diamond-Mortensen-Pissarides model, a frequently used tool to estimate how unemployment benefits, interest rates, the efficiency of employment agencies and other factors can affect the labor market.

President Barack Obama nominated Diamond to the Federal Reserve in late April. But Senate Republicans have blocked his nomination, questioning his practical experience, as well as the conclusions of his research. In the early 1980s, Diamond wrote a paper that found federal unemployment insurance helps companies land job seekers with the right skills by allowing the unemployed to hold out for the right opportunity.

Some Republicans argue that extending unemployment benefits -- as Congress has done on multiple occasions since the recession -- can actually make unemployment worse by taking away the incentives to finding work. Liberal economists dismiss that.

Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate Banking Committee, has been blocking Diamond's nomination to the Fed for months. Shelby says Diamond lacks expertise in so-called monetary policy -- the setting of interest rates and other tools that are used to influence the nation's economic growth, employment and inflation.

Obama said Monday he hopes the Senate will confirm Diamond. The president said he tapped Diamond for the Fed job to "help bring his extraordinary expertise to our economic recovery."